Sunrise with Seamonsters

by Paul Theroux

  Once I had come to Peshawar and asked for a bed-roll for the train and was told they had none. This evening I inquired again and was told they had one—but only one: "You may book it." I gladly did so and then stood with it under a whirring fan. Most of the larger railway stations in Pakistan and India have ceiling fans on the outdoor platforms, which is why the people waiting are spaced so evenly—clustered in little groups at regular intervals, and the humming fans make one feel one is trapped in a food processor.

  It was an air-conditioned compartment and in its grumbling way the machinery actually worked. I was soon traveling under a bright moon through Nowshera and across the Indus River at Attock. We passed through Rawalpindi a!nd Jhelum, too, but by then I was asleep.

  Just before Wazirabad at dawn there was a knock on the door of my compartment. "You wanting breakfast?"

  I could have been wrong of course, but it seemed to be the same brisk man who had asked the question ten years ago: it was the same bad eye, the same dirty turban, the same lined face. And the breakfast was the same—eggs, tea, bread on heavy stained crockery.

  Scattered showers of the monsoon had begun to appear. They had darkened Lahore, once the princely city of Akbar and Shah Jahan, now the capital of Punjab. It was cooler here and the rice fields had water in them; planting had begun; the grass was green. Here the soil was mostly clay and so brick-works had sprung up, each one with a steeple-like chimney. Little girls, some looking as young as six or seven, were digging mud and clay out of pits for bricks and carrying it in baskets on their heads. In sharp contrast to this, little boys were playing gaily in the grass or else swimming in ditches. It is the absurd puritanism of the country that requires little girls modestly to remain clothed and do laborious work, while naked boys can frolic all the livelong day.

  The decrepitude near Shahdara Bagh was interesting, because not far from Shahdara Station is one of Pakistan's most glorious buildings, the Tomb of Jahangir, with its vast park—grander than the Shalimar Gardens—and the marble mausoleum inlaid with gems; all of it in a perfect state of preservation. Surrounded by palms, it lies outside Lahore, another marvel on the northwest railway.

  When India was partitioned in 1947, so was the railway, and there were no through trains to Pakistan. But the tracks were not removed, and the steel rails still connected Wagha in Pakistan with Atari, the Indian border town. And then in 1976, the trains began to run again. Very little had changed on this line; the steam locomotives, like all steam locomotives in India, looked filthy, ancient, and reliable; they are great sooty thunder boxes, and there are eight thousand of them still operating in India; and the travelers, no matter what their religion or nationality, still privately celebrated the fact that they were Punjabis. The coaches were battered, and the train was very slow. This was the International Express.

  The Customs and Immigration bottlenecks were set up there at Lahore Station—platform one—and four officials, one after the other, peered at me and said, "Profession?" I said I was a writer. "Ah, books."

  The train left on time, which surprised me, considering that the thousand or so people on board had all had their passports stamped and their luggage examined. We traveled across a plain towards India. After an hour every man we passed wore a turban. We were nearing Amritsar, spiritual capital of the Sikhs, and we were among the great family of Singhs. Sikh is from the Sanskrit word Shishya, "disciple"—they are disciples of a tradition of ten gurus, beginning with the fifteenth century Guru Nanak who taught monotheism, espoused meditation, and opposed the Hindu caste system. Sikhs herded goats, Sikhs dug in the fields, Sikhs processed the passengers on the International Express. This was Atari Station and the operation took several hours: everyone ordered off the train, everyone lined up and scrutinized, everyone ordered back on. Then the whistle blew and the black smoke darkened the sky, and we proceeded into India.

  But it was not only black smoke in the sky. The clouds were the color of cast iron; they were blue-black and huge. It is usually possible in India to tell whether it will rain from the whiteness of the egrets—they look whitest when rain is due; and these dozens flying up from the rice paddies near Amritsar were brilliantly white against the dark clouds massing over us.

  We arrived just before one o'clock at Amritsar, and as we pulled in, passing buffaloes and scattering the goats and ducks and children, the storm hit. It was the first rain of the monsoon—pelting grey drops, noisy and powerful and already, only minutes after it had begun, erupting from drains and streaming under the tracks.

  The rain in its fury put the Indians into a good mood. It was the sunny days and blue skies—intimations of drought—that made them bad-tempered.

  Because of the rain, only rickshaws were running in Amritsar. Cars lay stranded and submerged all over the inundated city. I sat inside, deafened by the rain, and studied the Indian Railways Timetable, and after a while I became curious about the route of a certain train out of Amritsar. This particular mail train left Amritsar at ten in the evening and headed south on the main line to Delhi; but halfway there it made a hairpin turn at Ambala and raced north to Kalka where, at dawn, it connected with the railcar to Simla. It was an extraordinary route—and a very fast train: instead of going to bed in the hotel, I could reserve a sleeper, and board the train, and more or less wake up in the foothills of the Himalayas, in Simla.

  It was not a popular train, this Simla Mail. Its odd twisted route was undoubtedly the result of the demands of the imperial postal service, for the British regarded letter writing and mail delivery as one of the distinguishing features of any great civilization. And Indians feel pretty much the same.

  "Use the shutters," the ticket collector said, "and don't leave any small articles lying around."

  The whistle of the Simla Mail drowned the sounds of music from the bazaar. I was soon asleep. But at midnight I was woken by rain beating against the shutters. The monsoon which had hit the Punjab only the day before had brought another storm, and the train struggled through it. The thick raindrops came down so hard they spattered through the slats and louvers in the shutters, and a fine spray soaked the compartment floor.

  The Guard knocked on the door at 5:20 to announce that we had arrived at Kalka.

  It was cool and green at Kalka, and after a shave in the Gentlemen's Waiting Room I was ready for the five-hour journey through the hills to Simla. I could have taken the small pottering "Shimla Queen" or the express, but the white twenty-seat railcar was already waiting at the platform. I boarded, and snoozed, and woke to see mists lying across the hills and heavy green foilage in the glades beside the line.

  Two hours later at five thousand feet, we came to the little station at Barog, where every day the railcar waits while the passengers have breakfast; and then it sets off again into the tumbling cloud. Occasionally the cloud and mist was broken by a shaft of light and it parted to reveal a valley floor thousands of feet below.

  Solan Brewery, on the line to Simla, is both a brewery and a railway station. But the station came afterward, for the brewery was started in the nineteenth century by a British Company which found good spring water here in these hills of Himachal Pradesh. In 1904, when the railway was built, the line was cut right through the brewery.

  The opinion of the Indian in the hill station is that the plains are disorderly and crime-ridden. It is believed that as soon as they are above three or four thousand feet people tend to behave themselves. "People on the plains indulge in bad behavior, indiscipline and mischief," a man at Simla station told me. He was a train Guard, but he was full of complaints about lowland vandalism and tardiness and "mischief—especially political mischief" on the railways.

  "You're very frank, sir," I said.

  "It is because I have resigned," he replied.

  The residents of Simla are often visited by relatives. "They always say, 'I'm coming for two or three days,' but after three weeks they're still here. And there is something about this air that excites them and makes them difficult."
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br />   The man speaking was an army colonel. He had a remedy for unwelcome guests. He made lists of sights that were not to be missed in Simla. Each one was a day's walk from his house and it was usually at the top of a steep hill. After a few days of this sightseeing the starch was taken out of his guests and they were fairly glad when it was time to go.

  The most knowledgeable railway buff I met in Simla was a man who, over a period of years, had traveled all over India on trains visiting race tracks. He seldom stayed overnight. He would hurry to Lucknow on a night train, gamble all day at the track, and then catch the sleeper to Calcutta and do the same thing. I said it seemed a difficult thing to do, all that railroading. No, he said, the difficult thing was putting on a sad face and hailing a tonga and then riding Third Class so that no potential thief would guess that he had five thousand rupees of winnings in his pocket.

  I glided down from Simla in the cozy little blue train to Kalka and then in the late evening boarded the sleeper for Delhi. It was air-conditioned, and the bed was made—starched sheets and a soft pillow. There was no better way to Delhi.

  At seven the next morning I looked out the window and saw the outskirts of Delhi, simmering under the grey lid of the sky.

  At Old Delhi Station, it seemed to me that the unluckiest railwayman in this season of heat was a fireman on a steam locomotive. Rambling around the station yard I discovered an even more exhausting job: boilermaker. The boilermaker is essentially a welder, but because he deals with all aspects of the boiler he is often required to use his welding torch inside the boiler or the firebox.

  Today it was 103° at the Old Delhi loco shed, but Suresh Baboo, a boilermaker, crawled out of a locomotive's firebox to tell me that he was not deterred by a little thing like heat.

  He was a railwayman Grade Two and earned one thousand rupees a month ($100) of which four hundred was his "Dearness Allowance" ("Because in Delhi, food and living are very dear").

  Was this enough to live on? Not in Delhi. "We are asking for an increase in the Dearness," said Suresh Baboo.

  "For some reason—probably because of the British tradition—morale among railwaymen is very high," said Mr K. T. V. Raghavan, Chairman of the Indian Railway Board. His position in the hierarchy of the Indian Civil Service shows the importance of the railway in India: he is the second most senior civil servant in the country.

  Mr. Raghavan impressed me by speaking of the special nature of the railway in India. It was not merely a way of going to and from work, but rather in India a solution to the complex demands of the family. Birth, death, marriage, illness, and religious festivals all required witnesses and rituals which implied a journey home. Indians, Mr Raghavan said, only seemed to be restless travelers; in fact, most of them were merely showing piety and carrying out religious or domestic duties.

  In Delhi I found the best organized railway station in India. This was Hazrat Nizamuddin Station, just south of the city and a short walk from Humayun's Tomb.

  There were flowers and shrubs in pots on the platform, and every day on the orders of the Stationmaster, Mr G. L. Suri, ant powder was sprinkled along the walls. Mr Suri proudly took me on a tour of the station. He hadn't been recommended to me by the Railway Board—I had simply stopped on one of the one hundred and eighty trains that pass through each day and noticed how unusual it looked. How was it possible to keep a station so clean in the hot season?

  Mr. Suri said, "I do my duty—I get satisfaction from it. Sometimes I work sixteen hours a day. I do not accept excuses." He nodded and added softly, "And I am very tough."

  The Janata-Madras Express passes through Hazrat Nizamuddin Station, and of course it stops, because "Janata" means "People" and the People's Express stops everywhere. It is probably the slowest express in the world.

  It would be several days before this long rumbling steam train arrived in Madras. It was cheap—all second class—but it was not really for long-distance passengers; it went fourteen hundred miles, stopping at every station—just like a country bus—and most people only went a few miles.

  In India, it is easy to tell the long-distance travelers. They are heavily laden, and always carry a big steel trunk. At railway stations in India one sees the family grouped around the trunk—they sit on it, sleep beside it, use it for a table, and when their train draws in they hire a skinny man to wrestle it on board.

  "My mother was typical," a man told me on this train. "She carried all her jewelry and all her saris—thirty or forty of them. She brought glasses to drink out of, cooking utensils, plates and the trays we call thali. She took the essential household. All Indians do this. The trouble was that my mother used to take all these things even if she was only going away for a day or so."

  It seemed that the trunk was an Indian's best defense against being robbed, contaminated, or stranded: it made them completely portable and very safe. At any moment, using the trunk, an Indian could set up house.

  "You're not going far," I was reminded.

  No, only to Agra—six hours on this slow beast; but six hours was nothing on an Indian train, where some people might say, "When do I arrive? Let me see. Today is Thursday and tomorrow is..."

  I was sitting across from Bansilal Bajaj, who was on home leave from Abu Dhabi—every two years he got two months' leave, and he spent a month of that on Indian Railways, going up and down the country.

  "In Abu Dhabi all we do is work. I am in the catering and cleaning business, but I am no more than a machine. When I come back to India I am human again."

  It was a lovely evening, very clear, just after a heavy rainstorm of the monsoon. Now there was not a cloud in the sky, and in the west it was the color of a tropical sea—greeny-blue, reflected in perfectly still pools and paddy fields. There was a sweetness in the air and for a number of miles no people—just color and empty space and darting birds.

  Just after dark the lights in the train failed, and we traveled clattering through pitch-blackness, with the steam engine puffing and wheezing, and the whistle blowing off-key, and the only lights were the sparks from the smokestack, sailing past the window like fireflies.

  It was almost nine by the time we arrived in Agra. The town is nothing. The Agra Fort is substantial. Akbar's Mausoleum of Sikandra has character, and the Moti Masjid (the "Pearl Mosque") has personality; but the Taj Mahal is something else. Just looking at it you are certain that you will never forget it. It is not merely a visual experience, but an emotional one—its pure symmetry imparts such strong feeling; and it is a spiritual experience, too; for the Taj Mahal is alone among buildings I have seen. It is not merely lovely; it looks as if it has a soul.

  The Ganga-Yamuna Express to Varanasi was like a certain kind of Asiatic prison cell.

  It was a long night. Dawn broke at Kanpur, and two hours later at Lucknow it was very sunny and bright, a noontime heat, though it was hardly half-past seven in the morning.

  All the paddy fields were brim full. The rains were dangerously strong in Hardwar and had flooded Delhi, but here beside the line of the Ganga-Yamuna Express they had guaranteed a great rice crop and had given the landscape a serene lithographed look—the palms very still, the buffaloes obedient, the Indians up to their shins in water. An emblematic mother weeding vegetables with her infant in the middle of another field under the shade of a big black umbrella.

  For miles, for hours—for days on these plains—you see nothing else at this time of year: men, women, and children planting, or plowing or tending the crop, and all of them working under the blazing sun and burned as black as their buffaloes.

  The villages were mud huts and grass roofs, like a glimpse of central Africa in the province of Uttar Pradesh, except that in the center of every frail village was always a substantial stone temple. None of these villages were sign-posted but sometimes a tiny station or a halt displayed the name. One sun-baked station in the middle of the hot plain was Rudanli. Three horse-drawn tongas were waiting at the platform, and some people looked hopefully up from their tin trunk
s. The Ganga-Yamuna Express did not stop.

  We were going the long way to Varanasi, taking "the Faizabad Loop," via Ayodhya where monkeys on the platform sat on the inkblots of shade. We passed through Shahganj, where rice planters stood scanning the blue sky for clouds; and then after Jaunpur we joined the main line.

  Varanasi Station has the contours of a Hindu temple, built in the Mauryan style, and like a temple it is filled with holy men and pilgrims. It is also full of sacred cows. The cows at Varanasi Station are wise to the place—they get water at the drinking fountains, food near the refreshment stalls, shelter along the platforms, and exercise beside the tracks; they also know how to use the cross-over bridges and can climb up and down the steepest stairs.

  "We are installing cow-catchers," the Station Superintendent told me—but he did not mean the traditional ones, on the engines, he meant fences to prevent the cows from entering the station.

  The flocks of goats at Varanasi Station are on their way to the Ganges to have their throats cut and be dumped into the river as a sacrifice; the beggars are testing the piety of the pilgrims; and those small narrow bundles that are part of so many of the travelers' luggage are in fact human corpses, headed for the cremation fires on the ghats. Because nothing that is holy in India can be regarded as dirty, holy Varanasi with its fifteen hundred temples is one of the filthiest of Indian cities and positively stinking with sanctity. I met an Indian medical student who had just arrived in Varanasi. He was on his way to the Ganges to take his ritual bath. He said he was definitely planning to bathe in the Ganges, among the dead goats and monkeys and corpses of beggars who died at the station and were taken in rickshaws to the river and thrown in uncremated.